the eighth day . part 1
Day Seven
It was numbingly hot.
Sitting with their backs against the remnants of their bunks, clothes disregarded and forgotten, sopping with sweat at their feet; they’d given up on movement. She’d nearly fainted when she’d tried last and that had been an hour ago. He’d been seeing snow.
Inwardly, he revoked his forgiveness toward Starbuck. She may have left them booze, but she was the frakking reason they were up here in the first place. It was her fault they were dead.
River shifted her head against his shoulder, dropping her forehead against the side of his neck and his skin cooled for the briefest moment. But then her hair was sticking uncomfortably against him and he had to move to peel the strands off, bunching her hair at the top of her head with his fist, and for a moment contemplated pulling out his KA-BAR and cutting it off. It wasn’t like it mattered; it wasn’t like they were coming out of this.
Her pessimism was rubbing off on him.
“It’s not pessimism,” she snarled at him without heat, prodding him between the ribs with more force than he would have given her credit for in their current states. “It’s realism, frakhole.”
If he didn’t feel her lips moving against his neck he would have thought he was hallucinating. He snorted into the air (he’d forgotten that she could read his mind and whatnot), eyes sliding shut, his hand still resting against the top of her head, ideas of cutting it forgotten. “We should have taken the deal.”
“No.” Now there was heat in her snarl, jerking away from his chest angrily. His hand hovered in the air, strands of her hair wound around his fingers after being ripped out by her effort. River shut her eyes quickly as the sudden movement had her seeing white, the forgotten pounding in her head coming to the front at full force-full speed ahead, captain!
He sighed behind her. Yes, we should have. You’d rather be dead?
“We are dead.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “You said it yourself, remember?”
“That’s not fair.”
“We’re on a spaceship with no power drifting toward a sun. Nothing is fair.”
Sam kicked at her thigh viciously with a booted foot, knocking her over and forward and pretended not to be more than a little turned on by her naked ass in the air. She laughed beneath her hair, turning to look at him through the dark mass sticking to her face. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were red from tears or the heat or both.
If they’d taken the deal they’d be alive, never mind for how long, but they would be alive and it would be enough.
“We should have taken it.”
“Your mother did,” hissed River. “Look what happened to her.”
He looked away. She sighed. Her hand came up to push her hair out of her face, turning her body to sit across from him. He didn’t bother to keep his mind from wandering toward sex. He wondered what a child of theirs would even look like.
It wouldn’t matter now.
“Sam-“
“Don’t, Mouse,” interrupted Sam softly. He sighed, dropping his head against the mattress covered wall and looking up. He could see the heat coming off the metal panels overhead; hear it creak as it expanded in the heat outside.
Sam closed his eyes, exhaling slowly through his nose. “The next time I see Starbuck, I’m punching her in the face.”
Day One
“Gods damn Raptor pilots and their frakking bonds.”A wide-eyed crewman stepped out of the way quickly and saluted as Starbuck rounded the corner swearing, sporting a light bruise on her cheek and her lips twisted in a snarl. Her knuckles were raw and ash from a cigar was rubbed into the front of her standard. She didn’t bother looking behind her as she opened her mouth to bark at the taller man following her. “Rooster more than asked for a beat down. I already have a problem with you; you don’t need to make it worse.”
“You’d love me to make it worse,” he snapped back. He had a circular burn on his hand from Starbuck’s cigar and blood smeared across the side of his face. Not his blood, his former partner’s blood. Rooster really didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut around Starbuck; she’d had it in for them since they’d stepped onto the Galactica, and he’d never stepped down from a challenge-just because they weren’t Viper pilots didn’t make them any less important. But he’d stopped wanting to run headfirst into danger the minute he past flight school.
And Rooster just had to make a comment about Kara’s ass.
Of course she’d thrown down with him, and Rooster was his best friend, so of course the taller man had to come to his rescue and pulled him off. So while Rooster got thrown into the hold, he’d gotten the pleasure of being Starbuck’s bitch, and was getting shoved into a Raptor with someone he didn’t know on an assignment that was so frakking stupid he’d accuse her of abusing her authority if he didn’t like having his balls where they were.
She’d probably just say ‘Frak yeah,’ and that would be that.
Starbuck stopped suddenly when they were in the docking bay, spinning around to face him, muttering a swear under her breath. He frowned at her, looking around her to see what she was looking at and saw Helo talking to Tyroll, both of them looking uncomfortable and glancing at a smallish girl with dark hair, maybe a year older than he was, stroking a Raptor in a way that could only be called… lovingly.
“What in the hell-?”
“Sasquatch, meet your new partner,” said Starbuck, and he realized that she had turned around, not because she hadn’t wanted the girl to see her, but because she was laughing too hard to be appropriate. “Little Mouse.”
Sasquatch opened his mouth to snarl that he didn’t need a new partner; he had a perfectly good one-albeit a shiny bruised and bloody one- but he still frakking had one. When he realized Starbuck meant her his brain froze, mouth still hanging open. The weird girl who was now wiping her fingerprints off the glass window… that was his new Raptor partner?
“Little Mouse is the best frakking pilot in the whole frakking fleet,” said Starbuck tightly (very, very tightly, Sasquatch noticed with a smirk). “But she said something to Tigh that pissed him off. You know what happens next.”
“He punched her?”
Starbuck cackled. “Tried. She dodged him and knocked him unconscious with a well-placed kick to the side of the head. Commander didn’t know whether to punish her or give her a cookie. I guess this is what he decided.”
“She doesn’t look too upset.”
“She has to spend five whole days in an enclosed space with you. She’s smart, I’m sure she’ll realize this is punishment.”
“Go frak yourself, Lieutenant.”
Starbuck stepped up to him, into his space, looking down her nose at him even as she craned her head to look him in the eye. And there was a tense moment where Sasquatch thought she might hit him. “Get in the damn bird, Sammy.”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything, just followed her with his glare as she dropped the file in her hands onto the floor at his feet and moved around him, leaving him with…Little Mouse.
She looked over at him from where she was speaking with a very uncomfortable looking Tyroll and cocked her head to the side. “You’re not going to say hello?”
“Hi,” said Sam, tightly, bending down to pick up the folder. Little Mouse rolled her eyes.
“I meant to the ship.”
He paused. Gods of Cobalt hear my prayer… this was going to be a long trip.
.
Sam watched “Little Mouse” out of the corner of his eye warily as the Chief did one last systems sweep (wouldn’t do him any good if the gimble was really shot like Boomer kept complaining it was) before they went up. He was still pissed at Starbuck; even Helo had agreed she was being a bitch.
Also, his new partner was weird and mysterious. Helo didn’t envy him for his new partner. Despite how hot she frakking was, mysterious was never good when that person held your life in their hands.
“You’re all clear.” Sam’s train of thought was interrupted by a stream of static and Tyroll’s voice in his helmet. He waved at the two of them from outside the craft, flashing them a quick thumbs up.
Sam closed his eyes briefly as Mouse started up the thrusters. He hated taking off and landing, like his body couldn’t handle parting from solid ground or empty space. He hummed over the thrusters, an old tune from his childhood forever embedded in his psyche as if he’d been through years of torture - Metallica.
The humming continued as Little Mouse got them air borne and into space. He had to admit, she was a damn good pilot. This was probably cake compared to flying a Viper, though the Raptor didn’t obey with the slightest touch as its sleeker counterpart. Still, he understood why Starbuck would be jealous of her, so what if she was a little weird? All Viper pilots had their quirks: Terra was a closet voyeur, Apollo had daddy issues, Creeper liked dating men, Starbuck was a drunken bitch-
“Are you going to keep up that Gods awful noise throughout the entire mission?”
It took Sam almost a minute to realize Little Mouse had spoken, even longer to realize that she wanted him to shut up. Her voice was almost childlike; if it wasn’t so full of cynicism and brazen rightness he would have thought she was naïve. He stopped humming as fast as if she had slapped him then cleared his throat.
“Sorry.”
She ignored his apology. “Your callsign’s Sasquatch.” It was rhetorical, but he nodded anyways. “And Starbuck told you mine.” Again, not a question.
“Little Mouse,” Sam glanced at her when he heard a soft noise coming from the direction she was sitting. She was turned slightly to the right, checking the thruster control, giving him a view of the smirk on her face, and he knew what she was thinking. It really wasn’t that funny.
“I see the satire isn’t lost upon you,” she said, her eyes flickering back to him. Starbuck must have thought she was hilarious, sticking the Sasquatch with the Little Mouse.
He had to hold back the urge to snarl. The snort next to him said him he didn’t hold back enough.
Gods of Cobalt. Frak you Starbuck.
“We’re clear to jump,” he said instead, focusing on his screens. He felt Mouse nod next to him.
“Fire it up.”
.
They had a stupid mission; they’d established that-frak it barely qualified as a mission. And stupid missions meant less fuel distributed; less fuel meant fewer jumps they would be able to make. Ten at the most with what they had, even less if they ran into trouble, like pirates or something… Helo swore up and down that he and Boomer barely made it out alive after running into a ship of criminals once on a perimeter jump. (“Outlaws, Winchester.” “Were they pirates or cowboys, Agathon? Make up your frakking mind.”)
Sam continued to sit in silence, preferring that as opposed to making small talk with a girl he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know. He wondered what Dean was doing right then, if he was at a bar on Caprica or trying to sneak onto a ship to fool around. He’d done to Sam it before: snuck onto the Galactica and flirted with Racetrack until she slept with him, and then followed him around all morning asking about eggs. He hadn’t told people that Dean was his brother, just a…friend. A really annoying friend who treated him like a kid brother and never took him seriously.
He and Starbuck clashed, which really surprised him. He cackled inwardly at the memory of Starbuck punching Dean in the jaw and landing on her ass after he scissored her legs from the ground.
“Wow, your life is so fascinating. I wish I grew up rich and normal…. It wasn’t all great. What I managed to accomplish was completely ignored by my parents because it’s just who I was, it was probably worse than what you thought you had to live up to…. I bet you excelled at it…. I really did-”
Sam’s pleasant memories were interrupted by Mouse, and she sounded like she’d been talking for a while; changing her voice to a deeper pitch, like she was having a conversation with herself. A conversation that really flattered her ego. Sam felt his lips pouting in confusion and he turned his head slowly to look at her, so as to not alert her to his sudden eavesdropping…which…they were the only ones in there, so it couldn’t really be eavesdropping, could it?
“What the frak are you doing?”
“We’re getting to know each other,” said Mouse without missing a beat or even acknowledging that what she was doing was even the slightest bit weird and if Sam’s face twisted in outrageous disbelief, it was all on its own.
“You and who?”
“You.”
He blinked. “Me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. You.”
“How?”
“Well,” she started to explain slowly, like talking to a child. “I ask you a question, and then I respond for you. It’s not like you’re good company.”
“I am excellent company,” said Sam, a little offended. Mouse turned around in her chair to face him fully, giving him a look that clearly said she didn’t believe him. Sam raised his chin, not backing down. She huffed and he took that as a sign to begin the conversation.
“Where did you grow up?”
“That’s what you start with? You don’t offer your name or even ask mine, but ’where I grew up’?” she snorted lightly. “That’s what you started with in my conversation, too.”
He ignored her. “I traveled all over the colonies when I was growing up.”
“Because everywhere you went someone needed help and your father felt like it was his duty to help them like he couldn’t help your mother.”
“My dad was a-” Sam stopped, his mouth hanging open as he processed exactly what she’d just said. Which was what he had been thinking, but not about to say. Dad felt it was more than his duty to help people, especially people who didn’t know the kinds of things they got into, like demons. Before he’d even been born, his mother had made a deal with a demon and it killed her. So, instead of grieving like a normal person would do and ignore what could not only be impossible, but sort of sacrilegious, John Whichester left Caprica and set out to find the demon that had did his wife in.
He and Dean had been dragged all over the frakking verse looking for the demon with yellow eyes, taking people’s hopes and dreams and creating them for a price. Ten years, one soul. That was how the crossroads demons worked, and that’s how they had worked for only the Gods knew how long.
He’d entered the fleet trying to escape the ground, trying to escape heavens and hells and consequences. Space seemed to be neutral territory: not enough sin, not enough sorrow.
“I grew up on Caprica,” said Little Mouse, smoothly interrupting his thoughts once again. “My father is a politician, my mother holds a government position with unknown standings. My older brother is a trauma surgeon in Caprica City. He’s very important.”
“Sounds like your whole family is important,” muttered Sam, not really caring, she was rich and he was-
“We are.”
Trying to be normal. “And you?”
“I’m…special, as my brother would say.” She glanced at him in the reflection off the glass. “Nobody is ever really normal.”
Sam shook his head, a dark chuckle threatening to build in his chest. “What are you, reading my mind?”
He wasn’t looking at her, but he could imagine the cocky look she was giving his reflection. “Would it really be that easy?”
Gods he hoped it wasn’t.
.
They decide to sleep in shifts (because he was still freaked out by her, and didn’t completely trust her not to wake him if they get sucked into a black hole or some shit) and he went first, taking control of the Raptor; checking to make sure their course was plotted correctly, that there weren’t any immediate threats in the vicinity before he settled in for a long, silent four hours by himself.
The first hour he spent in complete silence, staring warily at Mouse out of the corner of his eye as she stretched out on one of the two cots they had in the ship. She’d stripped down to her standards and tied her long hair back into a braid to keep it from knotting in her sleep. The black material stood out against her pale skin, and he had to remind himself (several times) that she’d been properly trained and could kick his ass if she caught him staring. He let out a long breath of relief he’d not known he’d been holding when she started snoring slightly and stretched out his limbs, stiff after forty five minutes of so little movement.
The second hour he made paper footballs out of his manual and tried to see how many he could make into Mouse’s abandoned shoes- fourteen, and then he almost hit her in the face and decided to stop.
Sam considered the woman sleeping across the ship for a while. Wondering what her name was, why ‘Little Mouse’, how a girl from such a prominent family ended up in the fleet (and how no one recognized her and gave her shit for it. He knew her face, he just couldn’t for the life of him recall her name)-but then he stopped thinking about it and focused on her, facing him as she slept. Pieces of her hair had fallen out of its braid as she slept, falling over her face and she was-
Sam swallowed and looked away from her. He really had to keep his mind focused. Even if this was a crap mission, it was still a mission and there was still the very real possibility that something could happen out here. He couldn’t afford to let his mind wander on things like hitting Starbuck over the head with a crowbar or pretty girls and what they could do together up here in space, all alone.
He forced himself to concentrate on the screens in front of him, even though there was still nothing happening and he knew nothing would.
The third hour he started humming again, picking out lyrics from his favorite songs Dean had played on the road and singing them under his breath. He kept one eye on his consoles as he watched the clock, waiting as the minutes ticked away, and at four hours on the dot, he nearly had a heart attack as Mouse spoke up from behind him.
“I thought you were finished with the humming.”
He bit his tongue to keep from jumping in his chair. He swallowed the bit of blood and excess saliva filling his mouth and turned toward her with a bored expression on his face. As if he wasn’t just scared out of his frakking mind. He had been prepared to wake her up in a minute (he figured she was human after all and no human actually liked getting up) and switch with her, but it turned out she had an internal clock that rang like a fog horn. She smirked at him as she stood up from the cot, pulling her suit over her legs and leered back at him when she caught him staring.
He had no frakking clue how Helo managed to stand Boomer as a partner. He just couldn’t wait to get back to Galactica and his very male, very married Raptor partner, whom he would never ever consider stripping or bending over the console or-
He stopped thinking immediately when his imagination started to get the better of him; he’d already have a problem sleeping without wondering if Mouse was going to cut out his spleen while he slept-now he was going to have to make sure he didn’t dream about her. He cleared his throat uncomfortably and moved around Mouse as she headed for her chair, missing the way her smirk widened wickedly.
Sam dropped into the abandoned cot, not bothering to lower his own, not when they weren’t sleeping at the same time. It was flat and uncomfortable, but it was soft enough to sleep on. He didn’t bother with his suit; it was tight enough to hide any…anything that might happen as he slept.
According to his watch it was four in the morning, and suddenly he was bone tired and a minute after he’d gotten comfortable he was asleep. Later he rationalized that the only reason he fell asleep so quickly was because he’d humanized (sort of) Mouse as he watched (creepily stared at) her sleep.
He dreamed that she was petting his hair as he played cards with Helo, betting two Dean’s against his three Starbuck’s. Boomer was in a gold bikini with hair like Princess Leia and started stripping Mouse as soon as she appeared, trying to convince Sam that adding a Bobby Singer to his ante would guarantee him a win. But he’d been saving Bobby for the end.
His dream ended just as one of Helo’s Starbuck’s bit one of his Dean’s in the ass, and he blinked up at Little Mouse who was smiling at him brightly, holding a jug of water (it was tipped dangerously, like she’d been contemplating dumping it on him) in one hand, her other on his shoulder.
“I figured you were the kind of guy who would wake up at the slightest shift in his surroundings,” she said brightly, like it was the same as a ‘good morning’ and straightened, setting the water jug on his chest and moving back to her station, dropping heavily into her chair and propping her feet up against the wall. Sam cracked his neck as he sat up, holding the container against his chest so it wouldn’t spill. He looked around the ship, blinking at the drawings tapped to the walls. She’d been bored.
He squinted through hazy eyes at one of the drawings sitting on his console desk and blinked when he realized it was him she’d drawn (there was other stuff too, an man a few years older than them riding a dinosaur, a man in a suit with a unicorn head holding a laser gun, a spaceship clearly of her own design that almost looked like a horse, something he really didn’t want to look too closely at that sort of resembled a part of his anatomy that he hoped hadn’t made too much of an appearance in his unconscious state.). She must have done it while he’d been sleeping, and it was obvious how much time she’d spent on it. The rest of her artworks were doodles but this… Sam picked up the drawing carefully, wondering where she got a sketch pad to fit into her belongings.
She was talented, and not just at flying or drawing, he realized, she was just talented. The way she mentioned her brother saying she was special; it was a fact, not an opinion. She was gifted in ways he could not understand just by watching her. He’d have to talk to her, he reasoned, but if he did he wasn’t completely sure he would be able to stop thinking about her. There was something about her, something strong and powerful that drew him to her and it wasn’t just because she was beautiful.
He wondered if she could dance.
“You snore in your sleep,” he commented, settling into his station, making a mark in the logs of the time and their position. She hummed in acknowledgement.
“You’re beautiful when you sleep.” Was all she said, and she said it so simply, like it was a fact and she just thought he should know. But her words had his head whipping around so fast it hurt. He stared at the side of her head as she leaned over her bag, sliding her drawings carefully into a folder inside and zipping it up.
It took him more than an hour to realize she had drawn on his face.
Day Two
By the time he’d managed to get most of the ink off his face, Sam was jittery in his seat. He’d been on long missions before, but they were interesting. There was gun fire or bar fights or crazy people with swords like that time those rogue ninjas hijacked that Raptor off the Triton. Now he was just bored, bored and with an equally bored partner. Sam pushed himself out of his chair, reaching up to the overhead compartments and opening them with a push of a button. Provision storage was, unfortunately, his weakness. When he was bored he ate.
Taking a handful of dried fruit containers and a bag of pre-popped popcorn, he aimed for the back of Mouse’s head and tossed the popcorn at her. She dodged it smoothly and grabbed it out of the air before it hit the ground, then tossed it up onto her console until it was lodged against it and the window. He wasn’t even shocked.
Mouse turned around in her seat slowly, giving him a look that clearly told him to speak or die.
“Hungry?” She rolled her eyes and he grinned, dropping back into his chair. They were silent for a while, Sam chewing his snacks and watching the back of her head, waiting for her to give in. He smiled triumphantly when she sighed and reached across the panel, grabbing the popcorn and pulling apart the foil until it opened. She stuffed a handful of most likely stale popcorn into her mouth and looked at him, like See? Eating. Now leave me the frak alone. Sam chuckled at her expression and leaned back in his chair, tossing a dried plumb at her to get her attention.
“So what is your name?”
She snorted around her food, peeling the plumb out of her hair and flicking it back at him. “I don’t like plumbs,” she replied with instead. He continued to stare at her expectantly, and she stared back. She didn’t silently tell him If you’re going to ask my name, it’s polite to give yours first. And he didn’t reply back with Yesterday you were complaining that I didn’t ask you your name, now you want to know mine?
“My name’s River,” she conceded, using her foot to move her chair back and forth. She raised an eyebrow at him. And you?
“I’m Sam.”
“Ah,” she said quietly. “You’re Sam Winchester.”
“And you’re River Tam.” He remembered her now. She’d been a legend at the fleet academy, before that she’d been a legend in academia, and before that she’d been a prima ballerina, and still before she’d been a prodigy. He knew her name and knew her face-even with all the traveling he did in his teens, he still heard about her. She suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“I didn’t enter the fleet to prove I was good at everything,” River said softly, twisting apart a piece of popcorn between her fingers. “Just because I am good at everything, I wanted to join the fleet.”
It made sense in a really frakked up kind of way. All Sam had wanted to do was put himself through law school, now he was a full time Raptor pilot and he loved it. He loved space, he loved the endless possibilities it could provide. It was one of the only things in the universe that was completely unconquerable, and he loved the feeling that every time he went up he was going down a path that could never have possibly been taken before.
River’s wrist tapped against his shoulder and he looked up to see her at the edge of her seat, reaching forward with her hand partially open, holding two white pills. She grinned at him. “Caffeine.” She said as way of explanation. He smiled gratefully and took them from her.
Bottom’s up.
But it couldn’t have been all caffeine, because half an hour later he was not only bored and really awake, but he’d started tapping. River kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye and snorting at the tweaked out expression on his face as he tapped his pen against his screen. Finally he gave up, tossing the pen away from him (never to be seen again) and pushed himself out of his seat, reaching out to grab the back of River’s and spin it around as he concurrently grabbed his travel bag from against the wall. She ‘eeped’ as he spun her and suddenly they were the closest they’d ever been. Sam dumped his bag into her lap and pulled out a pack of cards. She raised an eyebrow at the cards and her eyes darted up to meet his.
“What? You want to play Go Fish or something?”
“I was thinking Gin, but Go Fish sounds like so much more fun.”
River gave him a dry look. “Awesome.”
.
They were sitting on the floor of the Raptor; they’d turned the ship on autopilot after Sam had finally managed to drag River out of her chair (not hard, seeing as how he was at least a foot taller than her, but maybe he was exaggerating) and had their cards spread around them. River had a tick, whenever she was annoyed she would play with her hair. He had confused it for anxiety or a tell, but when she had practically snarled at him after he suggested they go back to work he realized she was loath to back down from any challenge and he amended his previous assumption.
Bring the crazy out to play…
Except it just frakking figured that she wasn’t just good at everything, she was good at everything. Sam sighed and tossed his remaining cards at River’s chest after losing (again) and propped his forearms on his knees. She cackled in victory, sweeping the cards up into a pile and shuffling them again (a classic dovetail, a prefect Mongean, a faro shuffle - she was showing off, he didn’t care and wasn’t jealous in the least). She raised her eyebrows in a silent question but kept her eyes on her hands. He shrugged.
“We could play truth or dare.”
“What are you, twelve?” laughed River in an only semi-serious tone. He kept his face blank when she looked back up at him when he didn’t say anything.
“It’s either that or strip poker. And it’s cold in here.”
She sucked in a deep breath through her teeth (he’d call it a gasp, but it was so much more provocative than a gasp). “When did you lose your virginity?”
Sam blinked. “You skipped the ‘or Dare’ part of truth or dare,” he pointed out. She shrugged.
“You were going to pick truth anyways.”
It was so not cool how she did that.
“What is up with the mind reading?” She gave him a look that said she wouldn’t answer him until he answered her first. He ignored it. She sighed.
“Sam-“
“Fine, fifteen, what’s up with the mind reading?”
“It’s not mind reading, it’s deductive reasoning. Did your brother bully you into it?”
“Probably. How do you know I have a brother?” he fired back, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. She didn’t miss a beat.
“It’s obvious, you act like a younger sibling, and you’re much less secretive then if you’d had an older sister,” she pointed to herself. “I would know; I’ve an older brother too.”
“It doesn’t explain how you knew I traveled with my dad when I was younger. Or that he liked helping people out in tight situations.” Was all he would or could say about that subject. She shrugged.
“No it doesn’t. Why did you call your last partner Rooster?”
Sam snorted. “Because he can be such a frakking cock sometimes. What’d you say to Tigh to make him try to sucker punch you?”
It was her turn to snort. “I told him that he would lose at cards against Starbuck later and he thought I was talking shit. Why blue?”
He blinked. “Why blue what?”
“Why is blue your favorite color?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it’s been engrained in my brain after years and years of road trips. Do you still dance?”
Sam noticed that her hand twitched at her side and heard the barely audible hitch in her breath, like she was offended by the question - like she wanted to slap him for it.
“This is a stupid game,” she said quietly, sliding her feet under her body and standing up fluidly. Sam frowned at her.
“That was probably the easiest question either of us has asked,” said Sam, honestly not believing such a simple question had her so pissed off at him.
“Yeah, well I don’t want to answer it.”
“It’s either this or strip poker.”
“Then start stripping, Sasquatch,” she stopped and closed her eyes, shaking her head as she brought a hand up to her forehead. “I’m tired,” she said quietly. “I didn’t react nearly as well to the caffeine pills as you did. I’m going to bed.”
“Fine,” muttered Sam, still frowning, still curious, but not objecting. River didn’t bother stripping out of her suit this time, just walked quickly over to the cot and fell into it, curling into herself with her back facing him. He continued staring at her for a long time, before he sighed in resignation and stood, moving to River’s station and flipping off the autopilot.
“I haven’t danced since I entered the fleet,” said River, so softly Sam almost missed it. He turned his head toward the cot. River had turned over onto her back, her hands folded across her ribs, staring at the ceiling. “It’s not something I want to share with the people on those ships. Dancing is everything to me. I won’t share it with someone I don’t trust, even if it means I have to dance alone.”
.
Again, Sam watched her sleep; much more willingly this time, feeling like she opened up to him on some level. But that became tiring, and with nothing to do he switched on the autopilot and (with one cautious look in her sleeping direction) pulled her pack into his lap. He reverted back to his days hunting with Dean, quick and quiet, unzipping her pack and pulling out the drawings she had done while he was sleeping. He memorized the order they were placed in her bag with a glance and started flipping through them.
He silently cursed her talent.
They weren’t exact copies of people or objects, they each had a distinctive manga feel to them (Dean would make fun of him for knowing the terminology, until Sam pointed out that Bleach was a manga and that he should shut his frakking face.), but they were wonderfully detailed, simple sketches.
“Stop.” The soft voice behind him had Sam freezing. Thinking he’d been caught, he turned his head around slowly, thinking up passible excuses. His shoulders dropped when he realized River was still asleep. Her eyes were moving fast underneath closed lids, her lips parted slightly. Sweat was starting to form around her temples, her breathing becoming increasingly erratic. Sam straightened, concerned, and tossed the drawings onto the console. He stood and made his way over to the cot, shifting uncomfortably on his feet, unsure of what to do. Her head suddenly thrashed to the side.
“Stop…th’blood.”
“Hey, woah, hey, River,” he grimaced and kneeled down next to the cot, his hands hovering over her body, like he wanted to shake her but wasn’t quite sure if he should. He placed one hand on her shoulder. “River, wake up.”
She didn’t, though. She was an incredibly deep sleeper (compared to who Sam was used to sleeping in the same room with, that is). The mumbling continued and Sam caught the words ‘heat’ and ‘metal’ over the sound of heavy breathing. His grip on her shoulder tightened, and in a moment of panic, leaned down and pressed his lips against hers.
Her body stilled beneath him, her lips parting slightly under his. He pulled away quickly, checking to make sure she hadn’t woken up. Her nightmare seemed to have stopped. Sam sighed, grateful, and leaned back on his heels. He grimaced suddenly.
Hopefully she wouldn’t kick his ass for it when she woke up.
days three through seven